


Animalia

by Skinandpit



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Implied/Referenced Suicide, Multi, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-31
Packaged: 2018-09-09 18:01:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,529
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8906284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skinandpit/pseuds/Skinandpit
Summary: In which everyone is born with an Animal, a creature that is nearly indistinguishable from their souls. They’re small, normally, but when someone is in danger they grow in order to be strong enough to fight off the danger. People being people, extremely illegal fighting rings, colloquially referred to as dogfights, have sprung up to give people a space to battle with their Animals. Henrietta’s ring was set up by Kavinsky and Gansey.Also: Noah’s Animal was murdered doing exactly what it was supposed to do – protecting him. Gansey, a medical anomaly, doesn’t have one at all.The gang doesn’t know each other yet.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Art is by Lenianu! (lenainu.tumblr.com) 
> 
> Also, there will be more story and more art in the future.

 

Adam’s heart wouldn’t stop pounding. He could feel it in his throat and his wrists. His Animal, Marmalade, slunk close enough to him that he had to be careful their legs didn’t tangle together.

Maybe Ronan’s presence should have helped, but he’d never been good at drawing strength from other people. Adam built all his courage up from scratch. He clawed its ingredients out of places where they didn’t belong.

Marmalade was a ragged-furred wolf, her blue-grey pelt shot through with enough browns and white to ensure that it would never look tidy. A pair of heavy yellowed horns, much like those of an ibex, curved from from her skull. With each pant, white fog rose from her toothy maw. Tonight, she was all snarl and uneasy confidence, a wild thing pretending to be tame.

She looks vicious, Ronan had told him once, meaning it as a compliment — Adam hadn’t taken it as one. She looked exactly like his father’s Animal, was what she looked like. Vicious was an inheritance he’d never asked for.

The air was cold, and the lines of the tooth-white moon were hard against the black night. The stars meant something, but Adam didn’t have the time or inclination to work out what that might be.

In the darkness, Monmouth Manufacturing was more absence than presence, a warehouse-shaped piece of sky cut out of the stars. He’d never been there before, but he’d heard stories about it — he dogfights, of course, recollections of which were passed around Aglionby like legends, but also smaller and stranger things. They said the boy who owned it — Gansey, Gansey-with-no-Animal — lived right inside of it, on the top floor into which no one was ever permitted. They said that was haunted by the ghosts of Animals which had died, and that Richard Campbell Gansey III lived amongst them because he hoped to make one of them his own.

“Certain?” Marmalade asked. Her voice was like silk. He could hear it in his deaf ear as well as his good one.  

Chainsaw cawed, a sound like demented laughter. She looked as sharp and violent as Ronan did, with her sleek black feathers and the iridescent snake-scales barely visible below her wings. Those scales where the only things that marked her out as an Animal rather than a common creature. Always, on Ronan’s shoulders, she looked like a portent. Her black claws left angry red marks on the milk skin of his collarbone.   She spread her wings. The scales glimmered. “Can’t back out now,” Chainsaw said. “Can’t, can’t, can’t.”   There was still time, though — Adam could turn around and walk home and no one but Ronan would be any the wiser. But the terror of looking cowardly in front of his boyfriend was as compelling as a court order.

“Certain,” Adam said. “Wouldn’t want to.”   Ronan grinned, wicked and proud.  Ronan had been fighting for nearly a year now, a period of time that coincided with his father’s death. (His father’s murder, Adam corrected himself — brutal and awful, something Ronan didn’t like to minimize with smaller words.) Night after night, he scrutinized the announcements that Gansey and Kavinsky put out in order to find each new secret location. Adam had been fighting for much longer — he’d just been doing it without ceremony, in the dust of the trailer park that he grew up in.

The fights — dogfights, people called them — meant setting two people’s Animals against one another. Everyone had an Animal in the same way that everyone had a soul. In times of danger, those Animals changed shape into strange and massive beasts capable of protecting their People. Most, if lucky, never saw their Animal’s larger forms — they lived whole lives without ever being at risk. If one were so inclined, though, it was possible to force that transformation, and use the Animals to fight. It was incredibly illegal, on the grounds that it was dangerous and immoral, but Adam loved it, and Ronan lived for it.   It happened mostly in secret, in forests set back from the roads or in alleyways unlikely to be traversed but, now and again, you ran into something like what Joseph Kavinsky and Richard Campbell Gansey the III had set up a few years ago.

Ronan had been asking Adam to join him for a long time, now, and Adam had been refusing for just as long. The jump from scrabbling in the quiet, hastily-thrown-together fights to massive, organized gatherings seemed too much, but he’d finally relented.   It was always money, breaking Adam over its sharp edges. Hundreds of dollars passed through the hands at these ceremonies. Thousands, he’d heard, although he wasn’t sure if he believed that. People came from three counties over to gather in the dark and set their Animal’s teeth and claws against one another.

They strode across the blank parking lot of Monmouth Manufacturing. In the blackness, it looked like nearly nothing, all its features wiped out and dyed grey by the light of the moon.

If he hadn’t been with Ronan, Adam probably wouldn’t have seen the door, which was more or less the point. An illegal dogfighting ring wasn’t something you wanted to advertise. It was was dark and rusted, set into the side of the warehouse, with only a single metal step leading up to it.

 

 In faintly luminescent paint above the doorknob, there was a small symbol — a rough triangle made out of lines that extended past one another, and above that, a crown.   Adam felt a little like he was about to throw up.   Ronan turned to him and pecked him on the cheek. Then he squeezed Adam’s arm and pushed open the door.

#

It was so dark that for a moment Adam could see nothing. He could only hear the sudden clamour of voices, rising and biting, exuberant, the caws and shrieks and roars of Animals, and feel the heat of all these bodies crammed into a space only barely big enough to fit them all.   But his vision adjusted and soon he could see the tangle of bodies, people and Animals moving slowly past one another.

Most of the animals were small, as they were meant to be, but some of them had already gone large. There was a massive white tiger with black teeth and three sets of eyes walking beside very small boy with equally white hair; an elephant with golden tusks; a massive elephant with golden tusks whose person he couldn’t spot; a six-winged bird soaring above them all and moulting feathers as red as blood.  

“C’mon,” Ronan said, grabbing his wrist. “We need to find Gansey.”

They moved through the crush easily — it parted to accommodate Ronan. This wasn’t terribly unusual. Ever since Ronan had shaved off his hair and turned himself into a starkly bald, broad-shouldered person, he was treated well by most crowds.

Gansey wasn’t difficult to locate, because he was sitting above the clamour on He was swinging his feet slightly, scribbling into a leather-bound notebook.

Adam had seen Gansey around Aglionby, of course. Nearly everyone had seen Gansey, even if they’d never been to Henrietta in their lives. He was a medical anomaly, and more than newsworthy when you took into account his mother’s political position. Still, looking at him was always a shock, a sudden flight of jittering terror.

He didn’t have an Animal. The empty space where it should have been was clear as a sucking wound.

It was wrong in the same way that – well. Once, not very long ago in the grand scheme of things, Adam’s father had hit him hard enough that he lost the hearing in one of his ears. The feeling of the loss wasn’t pain, and it wasn’t fear. It was a new sense entirely, not taste or touch or smell – just wrongness, pure and undistiled. That was what looking at Gansey felt like.

“Gansey,” Ronan said. Gansey looked up and blinked at him, slightly distant. If it weren’t for that one thing, he would  look incredibly small and innocuous – a tiny dark-haired boy, pretty enough, with a soft face that looked a little too young for itself.

“Oh,” he said. “Ronan.” He held out his hand in a fist. Ronan knocked his fist against it, too. Despite the familiar gesture, Gansey’s voice was businesslike. Adam supposed that made sense. They both made money off of one another.   

He looked to Adam. “Who is this?”  

“Adam,” Ronan said. “My boyfriend. He wants to sign up tonight.”

  “Mm.” Gansey pressed his lips together. He looked very slightly away from Ronan’s eyes — Adam watched Ronan’s shoulders relax as the contact was broken. “You should have told me earlier, Ronan. You know that.” Despite that, he turned his hand palm up. Ronan reached into his pocket, then handed Gansye a wadded-up roll of cash, secured with a dirty elastic band. Gansey took it, made it disappear, and flipped through his notebook. He wrote something down with a flourish, jabbed his pen at the page, then looked back up at Ronan. “You’re both in. Don’t do this again.”

 Ronan saluted.

Ronan led Adam back towards the crowd.

“You see Kavinsky?” he said, nudging Adam’s shoulder. He pointed, and Adam looked. There was a boy in a white tank top moving amongst the people, like a predator in tall grass. “He’s getting antsy. Means we’re going to start soon.”  
 Adam wasn’t sure how Ronan could tell that from such a long distance, but that was Ronan for you. Either he could read people with almost preternatural ability, or he was as dense as a brick.

Adam loved him something stupid.

He must have been right this time, because, as he watched, Kavinsky parted from the crowd and climbed up on top of the same staircase that Gansey was sitting on. Gansey stayed where he was — behind Kavinsky, he looked like a particularly beautiful, protective gargoyle.

Kavinsky’s Animal was a red salamander, wound around his neck. It became a dragon when Kavinsky was in danger. Just about everyone in Henrietta knew that.

 “HEY, MOTHERFUCKERS,” Kavinsky shouted. He grinned a wild grin. It should have looked vicious, but it didn’t — Kavinsky had a face as innocent as the child that he was. He’d probably look sweet if he were in the process of stabbing you to death. “LISTEN UP.”  

The crowd fell silent, the noise and clamour of human voices and Animal sounds crumbling away. Kavinsky stood where he was, postively radient in the half-light of the warehouse.   He put his hands on his hips. He reminded Adam a little bit of Peter Pan.   “We’re going to start. Roll call, boys, girls, and others.”  

Gansey stood up behind him. He was a creature unfolding, mostly but not entirely human. He flipped open his notebook. “Swan and Henry Cheng,” he said, teacherlike.  

The crowd parted to form a rough circle, and the two boys moved into the ring.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Second chapter!
> 
> A reminder that this story contains depictions of self-harm.

The silence stood between the fighters, a physical presence. It was brighter in the ring around them only because everyone else had stepped back, taking their shadows with them. 

It was jarring to see Henry here, a product of a different and brighter world. He stood with a distant smile on his face. His Animal, a golden glowing bee, was so small that Adam could barely see it even from his close distance.

Swan, though, belonged to Kavinsky, and so he belonged to this space as well. He had pale bare arms with a dogfighter’s telltale scars up and down them, and a wicked smile which contained far too many teeth for its mouth. His hair was bleached a white that the industrial filament lighting yellowed slightly.   His Animal was the white-furred tiger that Adam had noticed before, already changed into its massive form. It had two sets of golden eyes and tar black claws. It was quiet enough now that he could hear the click of those claws on the concrete as it paced in front of Swan. A hungry thing.

In the halls of Aglionby, it was only a housecat.  Strange to see like this now, but still somehow more suited to Swan's demeanour. 

While Henry’s body was as loose and casual as his smile, Swan’s was so taut that Adam could see every one of his movements telegraphed before they happened. 

Henry lifted his arms like a conductor. The insect rose up with them, its wings buzzing like a motor in the air, a strangely mechanical sound from an organic creature, changing as it went.   Enthralled, Adam watched.  

There was an element of elegance to it which was not usually present in the transformation of an Animal. They were weapons, really, as much as they were friends, designed to protect their people from harm through any means possible. Usually, their change was jerky and aggressive. Henry’s came from him like water, like the play of light off a window.  

Animals were triggered with pain or fear, usually -- something that called forward the desire to be protected. Adam wondered what Henry was thinking of.   

His Animal's new form was massive, a honeybee at least as large as a person, with wings that glittered like starlight. Golden dust fell from it — beautiful, but Adam saw the people nearest to the ring stumbling back, and guessed that whatever was falling from it wasn’t meant to be touched.

There was a beat as the two Animals watched one another, waiting for the first strike.

Beside him, Adam heard Ronan exhale sharply. He lived for this, Adam knew. Ronan was a fistfight disguised as a boy, and not very well at that.

 The bee towards Swan’s tiger with its wings spread and its stinger out. The tiger jumped for it, tooth and bared, but it swooped higher upwards, spiralling out of the darkness and into the haze of the warehouse’s overhead lighting. A haze of heavy golden dust fell from its wings as it went. 

The tiger was caught beneath the dust. Its movements slowed, growing jagged and stiff. It shook its heavy head and spun to watch the bee. 

 “Oryx,” Henry called, his voice sharp and carrying, full of an exuberant confidence. Adam wasn’t sure he’d ever seen someone so happy to fight. His eyes were bright. 

The bee swooped downwards. The tiger was done — Adam was sure of it. Its movements were too sluggish. Its footsteps were drunken.  

Then, just for a moment, Adam caught a flash of glory across Swan’s face.  

Just as the bee was in position to strike, the tiger spun and leapt.

Its lethargy was still there, but it had lessened. It must have been faking. It jumped and caught the bee’s abdomen in its mouth, then dragged it downwards harshly but still with much more gentleness than Adam had been expecting. They wanted to win, but no one wanted anyone hurt, not really, not in any serious way.

  It threw the bee across the concrete and pressed its paw over its thorax. Swan’s face was flushed. Henry's was pale and greyed.

The bee lay on the ground, its legs scrabbling, until Henry stepped into the ring, his voice breaking but clear, and yelled, “ENOUGH.”   

Swan’s tiger let go immediately.

The crowd exploded into whoops and cheers as the bee soared upwards, shrinking, heading back for Henry’s shoulder.   Ronan turned to Adam. His eyes were glittering. 

_Alright,_ Adam thought to himself. _I’m glad I came._

#

“Adam Parrish and Blue Sargent.”  

His own name, when Gansey called it, felt alien. He’d almost forgotten that, he too, was competing tonight. His heart ratcheted up, but all he did was stand a little straighter. 

Ronan pushed his shoulder, very lightly. “Good luck,” he said. “Blue fucking _Sargent._ ” 

There was a strange, harsh kind of respect in his tone, something Adam was unused to hearing come out of his boyfriend’s mouth. He stepped forwards, feeling distant from his body.   The crowd parted as he walked.

It was a surreal moment — he had transformed, somehow, from an invisible bystander to the object of everyone’s attention.

Through the thinning crowd, he saw a very small girl walking forwards, people splitting around her, too. She had black hair shooting up in all directions, held together by a rough medley of clips, and a preposterous outfit— black tights and boots too big for her tied with lace and a jacket all covered in feathers and patched of multicoloured fabric that fell only just above the hem of a crinoline skirt. Her eyebrows were furrowed. She walked forwards with an expression on her face that indicated intent to kill. 

Her Animal was a small meerkat, wound round her neck. Its ears were flicked forwards, and its tail swished. He couldn’t see anything special about it, not from this distance, and not in this much darkness. 

Marmelade growled low in her throat as Adam stepped towards the girl and her Animal. 

The same silence that had fallen before each dogfight fell for him, now. He could practically hear the snarl on the girl’s — Blue’s — face. 

As she slid the feathered jacket off her shoulder, he could easily see that she called her Animal’s power with the same method that Ronan used. Her arms, brown and freckled, were mottled with dark scars that ran jagged across the width of her forearm. Most of them were in the middle where — Ronan insisted — it hurt the most and bled the least. 

Beneath the jacket, she’d been wearing a black tank top and what looked like a faerie’s utility belt. It was made of leather, unidentifiable fabric, and craft beads.   She slid a pink switchblade out from that pouch, and raised it above her arm. There was no expression on her face, only murder. 

Adam’s heart was the loudest thing in the world.   He shut his eyes.  

He didn’t need to use a blade to jolt Marmelade into her second form.   All he needed to do was to reach into his own memory and pull out a well-worn thing, the crystal-clear image of his father’s fist coming down on his face for the first time.

He opened them again.  

Snarling, Marmalade leapt from him. She was massive, now, easily threw times her ordinary size. Her fur hung ragged from her body. She didn’t change nearly as much as other people’s Animals — the same essential thing, but bigger. 

She turned for the memory easily enough, but she’d never once turned for the real thing. 

By comparison, Blue’s Animal was still small. It was perhaps the size of a large dog, and snarling something ugly. It, too, hard barely changed.   The size would give Adam an advantage. Marmelade’s strength was simple and physical.

 The meerkat shot towards him. 

It hardly took any time at all. 

Vines sprouted from deep under the earth,   breaking through the concrete. Their stems laden with heavy dark leaves and even darker berries. Adam stepped back, startled. He'd never seen anything like it. 

They didn’t touch Marmalade, but they were close and quick enough that she balked, hesitating in space.   That was all it took.

The meerkat shot forwards, its body small and sleek, and darted beneath Marmalade’s belly. The vines dissolved around her, and Adam realized that they had only ever been a mirage. 

She pulled with her claws.   Adam felt the raking pain. He cried out — it sounded like it was coming from somewhere else — and Marmalade whined, a higher noise, humiliating even in his pain. 

The meerkat tightened her grip. They were breaking, and breaking, and breaking — 

 And then it was over. Marmelade shrunk, clawing out of the meerkat’s claws. She loped back to Adam, and curled her body around his, growling low.

Numbly, he put his hands between her shoulder.

  Blue Sargent held out her hand, and the meerkat, shrinking rapidly, darted towards her and climbed up her shoulder.   The air was full of wild yelps and caws from people’s Animals — and, over and over again, like a drumbeat, Blue Sargent’s name sounding the war cry of some great army. 

Blue said nothing whatsoever. She bent down, took up her jacket and pulled it back over her shoulders then marched out of the circle, into the onlookers and towards Gansey to collect her prize money.  

No one was watching Adam. He stood blinking in the darkness for a moment, then went back to Ronan, whose eyes looked like fire.   

“Tough luck,” Ronan said. Adam stared at his feet. “Blue _fucking_ Sargent. Sorry, man. You’re good, but that was never going to happen.”  

It stung, more than he could admit. “Let’s just go home,” Adam said.  

Ronan looked back out over the bodies. Adam wathched his shoulders shift, trying to read emotion in their movement. Ronan’s thoughts were all carried in his body. "Sure,” he said, and turned and headed for the door.  

The moon was still there when they stepped out into the dark, and so was the cold. He couldn’t feel his heart anymore — he couldn’t feel anything, really, except for Marmalade’s rough fur under his hands. _Stupid stupid stupid_ , to lose in front of all those people, to think his gutter fights would give him any sort of advantage.  


End file.
